The Internet is a widely popular information retrieval mechanism for people with access to a communications network. Because a tremendous amount of information is available on the Internet, users often utilize search engines to locate information. Initiation of a search may generally require utilization of a search engine such as GOOGLE®, LYCOS®, YAHOO® or the like. These search tools build results from a user query, and return results in the form of a hyperlinked list of uniform resource locators (URLs) containing the requested terms. Specifically, text entered into a search field is compared against a repository of indexed words and pointers to an originating document. Search terms are matched against words and phrases on individual web pages, and a list of web pages is returned. Referring to FIG. 1, an exemplary list 100 of web pages provided by search engines known to the art is shown.
A majority of text searching algorithms is based on analyzing the content of individual documents. Conventional text searching algorithms only evaluate each document individually in a type of competition to see which documents match search criteria. When a user asks a query, he/she is looking for a small set of documents that provide an answer. Text queries tend to provide large answer sets and a one-size-fits-all relevancy ranking. These text searching algorithms typically include extracting words or phrases, creating indexing structures, and determining discriminators for calculating relevance. When a user submits a text query, the index identifies candidate documents or web pages and a resulting list is returned to the user.
Search technology has developed to provide more control regarding the appearance of a phrase or series of words on a page. For example, words must be in a specific order, words must appear near each other, or phrases cannot include certain words. The limitation on this technology, however, is that specific word combinations must appear on a single web page and not generally within an entire web site. Typically, search systems return results in the form of individual pages with corresponding URLs. These individual pages are sub-pages, or associated with a root page of a web site. Each URL must contain query terms and parameters as specified by a user. For example, a user may enter the query “X and Y” into a search system prompt. A search tool compares the query to a database, and a list of pages matching the criteria “X and Y” is returned. If “X” and “Y” are not located on the same page of a web site, the web page will not be included in the result list. Therefore, conventional search systems fail to return web sites that may contain the requested information but do not have all search terms located on a single page of the site. Therefore, a user may be prohibited from receiving possible relevant information.
Consequently, a need exists for a system and method for query based searches that provide results wherein at least one of the query terms or parameters may appear on a different page of a web site or domain.